Steve Barbaro – Poems | Interim Poetry & Poetics

2 poems by Steve Barbaro - Summons in the Form of an Evasion - 37 Panoramic Views of Edo

Steve Barbaro

Summons in the Form of an Evasion

I.

At night, the pond’s surface is stupidly eel–dense.Why is it that the word irredeemable, amidst the eels’flippy countlessness, so clutters the mind’s air?That cluttering is just the sort of clutteringkin to derangement, yet the force of the eels’flapping curdles into something like a sensuoussurfeit, I mean something like the sound of soundout–sounding itself—something, like, I dunno,the soul? Not that the soul definitively, like, exists.

II.

But not that the soul doesn’t exist. Or not thatthe soul doesn’t exist in spite of the body, & not thatthe eels’ motion isn’t the crudest motion. But not thatthe crudest motions, too, can’t make you feel your ownskin fleshing up against your own skin, as if towardsomething beyond itself, something indefinably specific.

III.

But through the sudden stillness of the eel pond,the eel pond’s boat–less, most un–self–annunciatorystillness, to which I wish you the utmost access, I amcertain that I can still hear the faintest of drips. Onecomes to such certainties, one would think, or liketo think, in spite of one’s self. Blankness, eels, darkness,blankness, ripples, eels, those subtle alternations,then at some point the distant cryptic noisereappears, that dripping, feeding itself throughitself, & feeding the surrounding silences, too,never quite crowding the silences but alsonever quite leaving the silences to the silences...

IV.

But at some point you must just let a thing bewhatever the hell it is… & in the wake of that facelessdripping, wouldn’t you know it but that each lasteel disappears. Just like that, the eels, gone,zilch… They went where—to the pond’s bottom?& they will come back when—tomorrow?The day after? Ah, but even the eels mustleave the eel pond to the eel pond, yup, eventhe eel pond’s eels feel the eel pondeeling itself through a forced sense of self.

37 Panoramic Views of Edo

Studying a long–dead landscapist’s work, we shudder.Your attention’s a kind of pool, mine’s more of a puddle.Framed and glazed, one info panel says. Silk: ink, gold, and color.A volcano looms bauble–like over the sketched city, as if made to order.Then, as if in offering to some God of Inscrutability, aloudyou wonder why you wonder about what to call that space thatclutters the mind all the more densely for the way that veryspace can’t be described, uttered… But fuck that word, you

snivel, I hate that eighteenth–century–type verb, ‘utter’…And what’s the point of pointing out the way that the names of placesalways somehow extend the space of whatever theypoint out? And why does that aggregate space unfailinglyflutter? But I want to draw a map not of space but of pure sentiment,you muse, because I don’t want to be ruled by sentimentbut to rule sentiment, & in the way that the land isn’t ruled by but rulesthe words it is called… But haven’t the words of maps also been the very

words that have made more odium of the most odium, & as if to mockthe mechanical way words mostly meekly lead into another & another?I mean the names of cities & countries are hardly inert, no?Yet to divulge, as one might divulge truthfully, that we are now, of allplaces, in Japan—uh, I just said it. Not to you, of course. But thisfact makes me feel, I dunno, Japonismic? Touristic? And would it be moreapt to talk of how we soon arrive at a typical Japanese garden pond?Or must I speak of how we are soon sleeping for a while near six

traffic cones? Or how all odium is largely the wont to wordthe land in full? Or how all fullness is the odium of the land’shalf–wonts? Or how all words scatter necessarily witha torque of incompleteness, self–unknowing? Or how, look,look: Japanese traffic circles the mossy throats of six ponds…

Steve Barbaro has poems, fiction, and criticism appearing in such venues as New American Writing, The Yale Review, The Common, 3:AM, Web Conjunctions, Prelude, and DIAGRAM. More information can be found at stevebarbaro.com.